The Rebirth of the Idols: The Freudian Unconscious and the Nietzschean Unconscious1

The author explores how psychoanalysis mutates in its passing from the privacies of the session to the public spaces of academia, shifting away from enquiry into unfolding unconscious psychic processes guided by its method, and from the clinically based notions Freud and his diverse followers constructed, here called the ‘Freudian unconscious’. In postmodern intellectual contexts Freud's work fuels a ‘Nietzschean unconscious’, issuing from public lecterns in the protagonistic, self-creating feats of a ‘psychoanalytic discourse’. The ideology of such mutation is here traced from Nietzsche on to Heidegger and Kojève, and then to Lacan and Laplanche. It reflects the might of the ‘death of evidences’ and the Romantic penchant for the limit-experience and the primacy accorded to the creative imagination. Discourse as revelation rests on a ‘paradox of the enunciation’ whereby the subject (author) of the statement is taken to be identical to the subject (matter) of the statement. Banishing the boundaries of illusion and evidence, and of self-overcoming and insight, academic ‘psychoanalytic discourse’ creates a ‘return of the idols’ in ‘theoretical’ narcissistic identification.